The National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine (1982) recently published a document titled Health and Behavior: A Research Agenda which summarized current knowledge about the interaction among behavioral factors and a wide range of health phenomena. Despite the comprehensive nature of this summary, it ignores the fact that ethnic minorities are at higher risk of various forms of physical morbidity and psychological dysfunction than many other segments of the population and that this high risk is closely related to their particular lifestyles. Hence, a conference is proposed to generate a research agenda specific to American Indians and Alaska Natives, a population in which these issues and directions assume special importance for subsequent intervention as well as prevention. The proposed conference will convene 20 nationally prominent research scientists possessing unique knowledge about the interaction between health and behavior in American Indian and Alaska Native communities. These individuals, in turn, will: (1) review the state-of-the-art of research knowledge in regard to those areas of substantive concern addressed in Health and Behavior: A Research Agenda which are of greatest relevance to the health status of American Indians and Alaska Natives; (2) identify gaps in research knowledge and promising areas for further research; (3) indicate the readiness of the biobehavioral sciences to pursue this research; (4) develop an agenda and accompanying priorities for the support of both basic and applied dimensions of such research, and (5) prepare a set of recommendations to the National Institute of Mental Health, ADAMHA, and other groups or organizations about these priorities and related issues. The conference proceedings, to be issued as one in a series of special monographs distributed through the National Center for American Indian Mental Health Research, will represent a major resource document for future research and policy formulation.